Well actually I would prefer the guy who goes with the established, tried and proven systems rather than the boy genius who wants to try his new wizz bang reinvention of the wheel on my ass. But that is just me. Must be getting old I guess :-)

Part of being a professional *anything* is knowing where to look and/or who to ask to get the answers you need.

Another part of being a professional is internally processing those answers into some form of lasting knowledge... "Homework" questions don't bother me because they're homework per se; they bother me because I don't think much learning is taking place. I have a sneaking suspicion that my answer is getting cut'n'pasted straight from the web to the assignment, w/o spending much time bouncing around in the questioners head.

Its the difference between:

Can someone give me the answer to #3?

Can someone help me understand what question #3 is trying to teach me?

I can almost *guarantee* that these nearly identical questions would evoke vastly different responses from the perlmonks community.

I'm not talking about reinventing the wheel, I'm talking
about not understanding why the existing wheel works.
Yes you need to know where to find prior art, but blindly
relying on it without an understanding of what it's doing
leads down the path to
cargo cult
or
voodoo
programming.

Well actually I would prefer the guy who goes with the established, tried and proven systems

But calling mom for advice is not doing that. It's seeking anecdotal support from a single source and I ate at enough friends houses as a boy to know that in addition to sounding contrived it has a good chance of being a big mistake. And while we're on it, the established, tried and proved systems include some that are responsible for tens of thousands of deaths a year. Bad prescriptions alone, in a heavily regulated, and long established system, kill 50+ persons per day in the US.

Though I'm for the original point. I want knowledge out there and in the end it seems to me that it ultimately helps only those who meet it at least half-way.

When putting a smiley right before a closing parenthesis, do you:

Use two parentheses: (Like this: :) )
Use one parenthesis: (Like this: :)
Reverse direction of the smiley: (Like this: (: )
Use angle/square brackets instead of parentheses
Use C-style commenting to set the smiley off from the closing parenthesis
Make the smiley a dunce: (:>
I disapprove of emoticons
Other